Create new connector to pull Salesforce Reports

[Vincent]

Create new connector to pull Salesforce Reports

We are a large company with tens of thousands employees using Salesforce on a daily basis. Over the years, we have worked with Salesforce to make many customizations and create many reports to provide data for various reporting needs. However, we have increasingly found it inefficient and prone to error to download the reports manually. We have many teams using the Salesforce reports as a base to create additional business insights.

Alteryx is a great tool to manage data ETL and workflows, but it does not support pulling data from Salesforce reports directly. Instead, it only offers connectors to pull data from base Salesforce objects. The data from Salesforce objects such as tables can be useful, but do not necessarily offer the logical view of Salesforce reports, and may require a lot of efforts to reconcile the data consistency against the reports our users are used to. Sometimes, it may be impossible to repeat producing the same data from Salesforce tables as those from Salesforce reports. That in turn would cause a lot of efforts spent by the reporting teams, their audience, and users of the Salesforce reports to match things up.

Salesforce does not have any out-of-box solution to schedule downloading the reports. At our request, their support team did some research and have not found a good 3rd-party solution in the Salesforce App Exchange ecosystem that supports this need.

I strongly believe this is a great opportunity for Alteryx. Salesforce already has an API that allows for building custom applications to pull Salesforce reports. However, most Salesforce users are more business oriented and do not necessarily have the appetite to engage with their IT staff or external resources provide to develop such apps and bear the burden to main them.

I have attached the Salesforce Reports and Dashboards API Developer Guide for your reference.

Sincerely,

Vincent Wang

[jeremy_dalletezze]

Salesforce reports are easy to create in Salesforce, but to reproduce them using Alteryx's connector is 1) near impossible given the complex children/parent relationships, 2) laborious since you can only input one table at a time, and 3) time consuming as each additional "Salesforce Input" node that you add creates an increasing lag for your entire module.

Several BI products and drivers (through stored procedures) enable you direct access to these reports, so the technology is present. 

Can Alteryx please add this capability to the Salesforce Input tool, i.e. input custom reports?

Thank you,
Jeremy 

[drahn]

Agreed - I have also found it challenging to use this tool, and I'm only trying to recreate very simple call reports.

[sharat_kutty]

in Alteryx v 10.0 there has been an update to Salesforce connector. If there is an additional connector to enable us to connect to reports that would be great. (Salesforce.com Reporting REST API) I have tested the new connector but it is taking a lot of time to recreate the report through the normal connector and also we have to be careful with all the object names to column names.

I am pretty sure most of the companies now are on Salesforce.com and have a marketing tool and having the Reporting REST API would help us to automate the analysis process while connecting to different tools at the same time.

Thanks,

Sharat

[Vincent]

I share the same sentiment of Jeremy, drahn and Sharat.

Many Salesforce users are used to pull reports, rather than pulling data from the base objects.

Salesforce has a REST API to support pulling data from reports. I wonder what the challenges are to wrap the Salesforce API in implementations in Alteryx?

Thanks,

Vincent

[stonehouse]

Hey Vincent, 

I've struggled with this too. The automated report generation native to salesforce just won't cut it in some instances. So I've created a base template that has all the object connections already established. Depicted below is a nonsensical daisy chain that doesn't have any practical value but you can see how if you just have all the connections in a workflow and the basic tools connected to them you can quickly mimic your reports with the join tool. I use this same kind of methodology for building a whole gang of other things too. I find it's 10x easier to build a process in Alteryx in conjuction with some basic SFDC workflow rules than using the Process Builder in salesforce. Not only is it quicker but it's easier to visualize and test. 

[JohnOrton]

Discussing this morning with our team and believe this would be a huge help in pulling in data from Salesforce especially where you have built in custom objects. Any idea where this stands?

[ChadM]

Bumping the thread, can we get an update on this please? 

[MikeN]

Bumping this also...any word on this?

[ARich]

Hi All,

Thanks for all the feedback and comments. No change in status on this- we're continuing to evaluate and prioritize. Please continue to up-vote.

[stonehouse]

If you learn how to write SOQL queries then you can pop those into the custom query builder on the salesforce input tool and essentially recreate any report that's been set up in SFDC. No, it's not as easy just pointing to a report and pressing run but I can pull down anything that report can generate. SOQL supports cross-object queries like report builder in SFDC. You can even aggregate data like a "Summary" report. Building SOQL queries in Alteryx is actually way better than using the report builder because you can get the summarized/grouped data right out of the tool whereas in SFDC you'd have to export the data from a report and lose the sums, counts and min/max's. Essentially you have to rework the raw data with a pivot table for a minute to get it in the same view as the summary or matrix view you created.  

SOQL is super easy to learn. If you know SQL already then it's cake. 

-Caleb